Bullet Press works how?

[Malarky]

I made a bullet press. I don't see any new crafting options for bullets. I need .22 rounds. How does it work? Or is that coming soon?

[White Pond Games]

It will come soon. All shelter crafting based industries are marked as WORK IN PROGRESS.

[DeadSilent]

I made the mistake of taking the armor station when picking a blueprint reward, which is also a WIP. I wasn't sure if that meant it didn't have a cut-scene or if it wasn't implemented yet. Now I know.

[YNTKTS]

Originally posted by White Pond Games:

It will come soon. All shelter crafting based industries are marked as WORK IN PROGRESS.

how long it will be? i'm really want to play this game on alpha version

[Falaris]

I don't have the game (yet, I wishlisted it) but I hope the devs consider 'real' bullet presses here, and some of the quirks people don't consider. I don't know how sim-like this is, but here goes..

The shell casings is the surprise thing - you want to recover those; they can be reused many, many times. That's why it's important to be in control of the area after a gunfight is over, or to have bolt action rifles where you can have good recovery discipline (instead of the gun chucking them twenty meters away). (Revolvers are *GREAT* for this). They are the hard limit on how much ammo you can have, and accurately forging and drilling the casings are a PITA you probably don't want to have to do - if you are at all able. It requires the exact right thickness and material quality, polish... you need a proper machine shop and someone with skill to do it, and it's a time consuming process. Much better to not lose them after a fight.

Gunpowder is important, obviously - usually a nitrocellulose. How much gunpowder do you need? A typical box of gunpowder you buy comes in 1-8 pound packs. One pound is 7000 grs. A typical 9mm pistol load is 5 grs. So, an 8 pound gunpowder box will last you 11200 bullets. I'm not sure it'd be worth tracking. It's hard to get that first barrel, but once you have it, it's the least of your problems; I'd consider it part of the loading kit and forget about it. (Although you might upgrade it to better quality for damage bonuses, if you want to game it.).

The primers are what you can't easily make yourself and need tons of. Still, if you do strike gold, you can find a package of 1-3k of them. They are relatively 'one size fits all'. Still, a decent chemist CAN make them. They are likely to be less reliable than bought ones and take a few unusual chemicals, metals, plus sulphuric acid; risk of dangerous accidents/explosions.

Making bullets is easy. It takes a fairly basic gas burner and crucible, or a slightly larger electric setup, and a few molds, but this is not a big deal - it's far from a full forge. The bullet molds are the mcguffin thing here that might take some finding - and you need one for each caliber. Most common materials are lead, copper, and steel.

Steel is bad, approaching extremely bad. It will cause massive wear on the rifling, it will have a poor fit on the casing, and won't deform properly to form a good seal with the barrel while firing. It's really easy to find in large quantities though. Plain steel rounds would be the worst ammo you would conceivably use for all these reasons.

Lead is great. Lead is king. Lead is the archtypical ammo, and it is for a reason. It does not cause wear on the rifling/barrel at all, it has a good seal both with the casing and barrel, it's easy to melt and work with - it's great stuff. And it also deforms on impact causing a lot of damage.

Good sources for lead:
Car batteries. Old plumbing. Radiators.

However, note that lead's softness makes it less ideal for automatic guns. Lead can foul or jam an automatic gun, esp. if it's running at full auto, which tends to handle bullets rather roughly. ('can' not 'will', it just introduces a small chance of jamming for full auto). The chance of jamming bolt action or revolvers are effectively none and lead won't increase or decrease that. (You can still have misfires, of course). Also, lead's a bit soft for dealing with armor.

Copper is good. It's currently replacing lead for hunting, but not because it's better as a bullet, but it doesn't cause long term negative effects on wildlife. For our purpose it's less common, it has a competing use in electric wires, but is basically equivalent - except being slightly tougher and smoother means, it doesn't have the extra chance of jamming in full auto, but also doesn't expand nicely on impact.

FMJ. Now, FMJ ammo tends to come in two varieties. 'regular' and hollowpoint. Hollowpoint can only be made with lead, and do more damage (and the Geneva conventions don't like them), while FMJ can be made with either lead or steel... but you'd probably prefer hollowpoint, so 'regular' FMJ might as well be steel only. They are basically lead or steel coated with copper. The copper negates the bad points of steel *AND* lead. Easier feeding the lead into full auto, and protecting the gun from the steel - and not the high cost of full copper rounds. Win-win. On the other hand - more complex to make, needs more tools, lathe? etc - basically a fine machine shop - and more work per bullet.

Exotics - everything from tracers to Mk 211 armor-piercing incendiary explosive ammo. You can't make this at home and is a really wide variety of stuff.

What you need the actual bullet press for is the process of lining up shell and casing, add a primer and a measured amount of gunpowder, and press them together to form a nice seal. This is something you theoretically can do without a bullet press, but reliability will go down a lot and the process will be much slower; with a proper press it takes seconds per bullet once it's set up.

Adding a wax seal is optional, but it does make the bullets waterproof.

I know, lots of amateur BS here, but at least I've seen and used a bullet press, but I think the general discussion should be sound enough to be useful, or at least a starting point to find out more.

Oh, quick note on gun loads - you usually find loading charts for ammo. Semi or fully automatic guns will be made for certain bullet loads; typically the industry average.
if it has the wrong load you're likely to get misfires. Too low a load and the gun fails to cycle properly; the next bullet fails to load and you need to do so manually. Too hard a load and the gun cycles too fast; worst case it disintegrates and bits fly into your face, most likely it just fails to cycle properly, or it can jam a bullet halfway into the barrel and you need to faff about extracting it. That's a bit of bother. You get the worst fails with too hard loads. Note that this is random only on edge cases; a too weak load will never cycle properly; a too hard load has a better chance of 'accidentally' not failing but also fails in worse ways.

Another source of misfires is if the firing pin doesn't strike the primer hard enough. (It does so through a copper jacket, after all). In that case it just doesn't fire and you have to manually cycle the gun to fire it. Most of the modifications people do to the internal workings of guns is to make it fire more reliably with the ammunition they want to use.... actually, mostly it's to make it sound cooler but fail more often, but that's the difference between intent and effect. :D